China has been devoting her major efforts to establishing training bases of software talents and to improving the general standards and international competitiveness of the software industry. Xidian University grasped the good opportunity and in 2001, on the basis of the former Software Engineering Institute, the School of Software was established as one of the 35 pilot software schools all over China.

At present, the school annually enrolls over 400 undergraduates and more than 200 postgraduates majoring in software engineering. Laying emphasis on training innovative engineering talents with practical skills, the School has become an important instruction base of cultivating high-level software engineering talents with practical skills and international outlook for western China.

The school adopts a diverse training system, which offers both diploma and non-diploma courses for both undergraduates and postgraduates.

The School aims to train students with a solid foundation of software theories, profound knowledge, and extensive learning. It specially endeavors to improve students’ practical skills, independent analytical skills, and the ability to solve practical problems. The School keeps improving its multi-level teaching scheme, which integrates assisted class experiments, course design, engineering design, and graduation projects.

In 2007, the major of Software Engineering was evaluated as “Specialty with Distinctive Feature in Institutions of Higher Learning” in the first Quality Project implemented by the Ministry of Education, China (Two construction centers were established). In 2008, the “Experimental Base of Innovation in the Cultivation of Industry-oriented Software Engineering Talents” was approved as the “Experimental Base of Innovation in Talents Cultivation Pattern” in the Quality Project implemented by the Ministry of Education, China. In 2009, the “Reform and Practice in the Cultivation Pattern of Industry-oriented Software Engineering Talents” won the Second National Award for Outstanding Teaching Achievements.

And the students are very keen to take part in various research projects and scientific competitions, and have gained many honors in various large-scale academic competitions, including over 20 international prizes and over 30 national first-class prizes.

The School possesses a well-structured faculty team with stable full-time members, who have profound academic knowledge and rich experience in software development, which guarantees the successful and independent running of the School. The School upgrades the quality of the faculty by striking a balance of improving current faculty and recruiting new members and by adopting the quadripartite pattern of full-time teachers, part-time teachers, appointed teachers from enterprises and appointed foreign teachers. Experienced part-time teachers from other schools of Xidian University and other universities are recruited to give lectures on fundamental courses. Senior engineers from enterprises are recruited to teach practical engineering courses. Full-time teachers and foreign appointed teachers give lessons on specialty courses. In 2009, the teaching team of the core course Software Engineering was honored as the “National Teaching Team”.

High-performance research is essential to the excellence of the School. One of the strengths of Xidian University lies on its ability to push forward the practical application of empirical theories of computer science in the fields of avionics, satellite navigation and positioning system, telecommunication and intelligent transportation, and the ability of continuously testing fundamental insights by constructing large critical systems in which they are embodied. In the past 10 years, our faculty members have pioneered in the empirical research in the areas of programming languages, parallel and distributed systems, networking and embedded systems, data engineering and security. Papers have been published in leading international conferences and journals.